Welcome

Wild and Woolly is a wool shop, a place to learn and a source of knitterly advice and inspiration.

We welcome people who know what they’re looking for, those who need some time to squeeze the wool and ponder in peace, and those who’d like some guidance about what to get. We welcome lifelong knitters, never-knitted-before-ers, non-knitting friends and lovers of those who want to have a go, and crocheters in all their guises too.

We welcome successful and disastrous knitters, knitters who are above gauge, below gauge and never check their gauge.

We welcome hungry babies with parents who need to give them a feed and have a cup of tea and a sit down while they look at patterns. We welcome toddlers who are bored of shopping and would like a story while they wait for the wool-choosing to finish. We welcome surgical strikers and the agonisingly indecisive. We welcome those who are seeking 100g of lemon yellow Superwash DK for a new baby and those who are seeking inspiration for a change in life direction.

We welcome those who are over 60 and finding new-fangled knitting tools and patterns a bit irritating and don’t want to be told to look things up online. We also welcome those who’d like to make friends with circular needles after a life-time of knitting with straights and want to show us their projects on Instagram. We welcome teenagers who are cross with everyone and would like some time to do their own thing at their own pace. We welcome those who need some time off from the crisis that they’re in the middle of, or the deadline that never leaves them in peace.

We welcome those who walk alone, walk with a stick, and those who cannot walk. We welcome those who listen with their eyes and look with their hands.

We welcome those who struggle to read knitting patterns, those who write their own, those who wish they could so they could make something that fits properly, and those who’ve never followed a pattern in their lives. We welcome those whose mother is visiting for the weekend and don’t know what to do with her so have planned a trip to the wool shop.

We welcome those who are inked, pierced or both. We welcome those in sweaters they’ve made themselves, sweaters that have been knitted for them and sweaters they wish they could make. We welcome people in sweaters with holes that they’d like to mend, with holes that they don’t mind leaving and sweaters without any holes at all.

We welcome members of the knitting diaspora and all other diasporas, knitters of all colours, face shapes and body shapes. We welcome knitters with frizzy, kinky, curly, wavy, straight, wild, tame and no hair. We welcome those who colour, straighten, braid, oil and cover their hair. We welcome yarn shop pilgrims, tourists, migrants, asylum seekers, neighbours, explorers, doubters and those who are in it for the knitting rather than the finishing.

We welcome those who have preconceived and cliched ideas about who knitters are, and those who secretly fantasise about joining the jolly shiny-cheeked late-night knitters when they walk past the shop after work.

We welcome stash-busters who want ideas, NOT more yarn, collectors of field-specific single breed woollen-spun small batch yarns and people who need a bunch of cheap scraps to make pom-poms with. We welcome both plant- and protein-based knitters and people who’d like to talk about what the difference is and whether it matters.

Knitting is for all of you and so is Wild and Woolly!

(With grateful thanks to St. Paul’s West Hackney from whom I borrowed a couple of lines and for inspiring and motivating this knitter to finally write it down)